Adam DeLong

About Me

Photo courtesy of Adam Bird Photography

I am an independent Rails and iOS software consultant.

I live in Grand Rapids, MI where I grew up. I moved back after graduating from the University of Michigan in 2008. I have been the organizer of the West Michigan Ruby Users Group for the past year-and-a-half before the handing the reigns over to another developer in August 2014.

Programming

My interest in programming started in high school. After college, I decided to pursue programming further (after spending a summer creating my own website), so I took some graduate and undergraduate computer science courses while in graduate school at Grand Valley State University. They taught Java, so that was my first exposure to object-oriented programming and design.

Ruby

I discovered Ruby and life was never the same. I started programming in Ruby first with side-projects, but then moved to doing small freelance projects, which led to being hired as a full-time developer for a local software development consultancy.

I have worked as a back-end developer focusing on Ruby-on-Rails web applications, but have worked on projects in PhoneGap, HTML, SASS and Javascript.

iOS

I also started to pick up iOS development through my own side-project. When the projects in Ruby came along, I decided to focus on Ruby development until this summer when I was offered the opportunity to take a course in iOS development from The Factory.

Due to Apple’s announcement about Swift in June 2014, we learned both Objective-C and Swift throughout the course. A couple months after the course was finished, I was hired as a developer to do iOS and Rails development for a local software startup.